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A new claim is doing the rounds online: that women who are too nice risk getting an autoimmune disease. And while aspects of this message are clearly dubious, there’s a reason it is resonating

Women, a warning from Instagram: “You really need to be a bitch or you’re going to develop an autoimmune disease. It’s that simple.” Versions of this scientifically dubious statement have caught the imagination of a corner of the internet, getting algorithmically nudged my way multiple times (a TikTok to this effect has 40,000 likes; a Threads post 26,000). Sometimes, it’s set to music; sometimes, it’s the basis for earnest discussion of cortisol and inflammation. Sometimes, it’s evangelical. One woman claims that, “Being a bitch healed my autoimmune disease,” adding: “Being the ‘love and light’ spiritual girlie is probably the reason why you feel depressed and you have IBS.” A Substack evokes the need to break the “good girl contract”, talking about those for whom “setting boundaries, getting ferocious about protecting their own bodies, minds, souls … sometimes allowed the nervous system to settle enough that the body’s natural self-healing mechanisms could kick in and heal”.

As a woman with an autoimmune condition (alopecia), this resonates on a woo-woo level: my hair fell out when I was trying and failing to reconcile incompatible demands; to make everyone happy. It’s also, I recognise, deeply silly. For a start, “women” – yes, all of us – needing to do something, or be a certain way, is a wild generalisation. It’s also definitively not “that simple”, and I would hate to upset a whole community of intellectually rigorous immunologists. I imagine them rhythmically banging their heads against their keyboards, muttering about there being no peer-reviewed cohort studies interrogating the relationship between “being the love and light spiritual girlie”, or putting too many exclamation markers and conciliatory qualifiers in emails, and autoimmune disease.

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The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

This week’s question: Donald Trump is not the messiah. But what does it take to convince people that you are?

What would the world look like if nobody ever made a mistake? Ian Osborne, Worcestershire

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Agreements would aim to shield British industry from new steel tariffs and stricter rules on electric vehicles due in 2027

Downing Street hopes to secure deals on steel and electric cars with the EU as it seeks to upgrade the post-Brexit economic relationship.

Amid economic uncertainty caused by the conflict in the Middle East and strains in relations with the US, Keir Starmer is seeking closer economic ties with the EU.

Authors set out to correct under-representation of female sounds – and found some surprising revelations

When we hear the beautiful call of a bird from a high bough, we’re told it’s likely to be a male – singing for territory, or belting out tunes to woo a female. But as the annual dawn chorus reaches a crescendo this spring, a new guidebook is urging us to think again – and turn our ears to the hidden world of female birdsong.

The songs, sounds and sights of female birds have historically been overlooked in field guides and sound archives. In 2016, just 0.01% of the bird sounds in the global Xeno-Canto sound library were labelled female. Another sound archive was just 0.03% female, according to a 2018 study.